8 easy steps to character education in the classroom

You can use technology to teach learning skills and grow a whole new generation of do-gooders!

xocial is a classroom management tool that helps teachers run fun and easy character education programs using the principle of competitive kindness. Create your classroom tribe in 8 simple steps!

Here’s how Ms. Emma uses xocial in her Grade 3 classroom.

First, Emma creates an account on xocial.

Next she organizes a campaign.

She’s got a great campaign idea. Now it’s time to bring it to the kids! She wants the campaign to support her unit on classroom kindness and tie into the book Have You Filled a Bucket Today? Emma clicks on the arrow beside her name in the top right-hand corner of the xocial page and selects “Organize a campaign” from the drop-down menu.

She creates a page for her classroom.

This is where parents, her principal, other teachers and anyone interested in what she’s up to can go for information on her class and the campaigns she’s running. Since it’s a public page, she chooses a cool photo of her classroom rather than using a photo of her students, and makes the About Us content fun but general.

Next, she chooses the privacy settings for her campaign.

Protecting the privacy of her students is important, so she chooses to create a private campaign. Anyone will be able to see general information about her campaign, but the participants and their activity will be visible only to Emma and people she specifically invites, like the parents of her students and her principal.

Then Emma fills in her campaign information.

The campaign wizard walks her through every step, from describing her campaign and setting a points goal to creating challenges. To keep things simple for the kids she decides she’ll have five challenges. She finds four she loves in xocial’s challenge bank and creates one of her own. When she’s completed all the steps, she previews the whole campaign then clicks “Launch!”

She enters the kids in the system.

Since her students are young, Emma will be the one to create the students’ profiles on xocial. The profile is identified by a username, not a real name, and uses a generic image, not a photo—this way the kids’ privacy is maintained.

She invites parents to watch the action.

Emma sends a note home letting parents know about the campaign and inviting them to send her an email so she can invite them to the campaign.

And the fun begins!

Emma takes photos of the kids as they complete challenges, knowing only those she has invited to her campaign can see them. At the end of every school day, the class checks out the campaign leaderboard and all the challenges that have been completed. The kids love seeing their names and photos projected on the screen…and everyone’s bucket is more full, thanks to Ms. Emma’s xocial campaign!